At present, there are, in hospital environments, no computer systems which permit the complete management of medications, as such a system is not on sale. For this reason, such management is carried out at least partially in a manual fashion.
As the nursing staff may have access to all types of medications so that they may be administered, it is virtually impossible to identify accurately the nature and the quantity of each medication administered to a patient so that they may be invoiced to the latter. This situation is even truer and worrying in emergency situations, as in ordinary situations, it may be imagined that the nursing staff has the possibility of recording on a sheet the medications administered to a patient which constitutes, in all cases, a loss of time.
Furthermore, the supply of the local pharmacies, which is to say the pharmacies located in each hospital department, is generally made at regular intervals, for example, every day or every two days following a check made in these pharmacies where the missing medications are listed, noted and ordered from the central pharmacy of the hospital. Consequently, a member of the nursing staff may be required, in certain cases, to make an unnecessary trip, as no top up supply is required upon checking.
The management of narcotics and anaesthetic products deserves particular attention. In fact, these medications constitute a class for which the control of the movements via the local pharmacies must be organized scrupulously. However, these checks are often too limited or so complex that they cause losses of time.
As concerns the invoicing of the medications to the patients, in most cases this is based on the prescriptions made by the doctors and the notes of the nursing staff. Consequently, it is not always possible to identify accurately the medications actually administered so that these medications are invoiced to the patient, more on the basis of the type of pathology treated than the actual supply of medications.
It therefore appears most important to be able to make use of a system for managing the medications in hospital environments that is either entirely automated thus excluding any manual interventions, especially for the invoicing of these medications to the patients. Ideally, this system would provide the automation not only to monitor the stock of medications in the local pharmacies but also the recording of the withdrawal of medications from these pharmacies destined for a patient, authorizing limited access to secured medications such as narcotics as well as recording the invoices concerning the medications in the invoicing device of the hospital.